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Inbound Marketing: Expectations vs. Reality

Inbound Marketing: Expectations vs. Reality What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy that aims to bring customers to your business. It contrasts the traditional outbound marketing method, which requires you to seek new customers actively.

A good inbound marketing strategy will make your brand or product highly visible. As it is considerably cheaper than the more traditional advertising routes, a large marketing budget is unnecessary.

Web pages, blogs and social media can make up part of an inbound marketing strategy. The most important thing is to share compelling content for your customers’ needs and interests.

A successful inbound marketing strategy operates as a two-way street. Your business needs to put effort into getting to know your customers and their likes, needs and interests. In return, customers can use your content (such as blogs or videos) to learn something new or develop a particular skill. It should encourage them to seek out further information, services or products, leading them to give you business.

Once your customers are interacting with your business or making purchases, you can provide them with additional content that will interest them. It will help generate future sales.

The expectations of inbound marketing

With an excellent inbound marketing strategy, your business, services, and products should attract potential customers’ attention and earn their loyalty. It should allow smaller companies to compete alongside more prominent, recognisable brands. You should expect to be converting visits into sales.

Regularly updating your website and publishing content such as blog posts or YouTube videos are ways to maintain almost real-time contact with your customers. Make sure your content invites and encourages visitors to like your Facebook page or respond to your Twitter feeds.

Inbound marketing, therefore, carries the expectation that you will generate large amounts of customers through visits to online content. It is all without the expense or time required for more traditional forms of marketing and advertising. There are, however, some realities of inbound marketing to consider.

The realities of Inbound Marketing

Constant analysis of your inbound marketing content and strategy is necessary to achieve maximum success from it. Regular time will need to be allocated to keeping webpages, blogs and YouTube posts fresh and relevant so that they are of interest to your returning visitors and potential customers.

It can be an overload on your already busy marketing department, but it’s not always enough to work to justify creating another paid role within your business. You can overcome it by outsourcing some of the work involved, such as blog posts.

As a new business or new to inbound marketing, do not expect immediate results; success does not happen overnight. A company may need between six and twelve months for its online presence to become embedded, recognised and visited regularly. Once it does, you might need a more significant sales force to cope with the demand. This will, of course, need to be budgeted for.

Finally, once your inbound marketing generates visitors, you must ensure that you meet expectations by providing the products and services offered. It will help you build relationships with your customers and create positivity around your online presence.

Contact us today and get professional advice on how to make the most of your inbound marketing efforts.